


Guiding Light, Only Light

by SpaghettiCanActivist



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Crisis of Faith, Hurt, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 15:45:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16915716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaghettiCanActivist/pseuds/SpaghettiCanActivist
Summary: John Murphy is a murderer, a traitor, a delinquent, the brat responsible for the spacing of a good man, a disbeliever, a faithless wretch. Jaha is not and John falls under that spell of resolution and faith.





	Guiding Light, Only Light

There’s a clear light in front of him, brightly shining and luminescent. Once upon a time, John saw it. It had been shored up by his mother’s soft words, his father’s firm belief that there would be an after, just as there had been a before and just as there was a now. The Ark wasn’t all that he would see, there would be more than tin, chrome, steel, titanium, aluminum, ceramic composites, carbon composites, synthetic or natural. His mother had liked to paint things with her words and she had spoken of magnificent things. She'd also painted cruelty and things which eventually John could only accept as the truth.

John doesn’t believe in any of those things anymore, not even the tin, the chrome, the alloys and composite metals which caged him and were home. They don’t mean anything anymore, so they aren’t real, not as they had been.

In a strange way, he hates the ground. It’s not strange to hate the grounders, no, that makes sense and it isn’t what he means. It isn’t the acid fog and the sudden emergence of mountain men, it isn’t starvation or the cold or even the burning heat. It’s the trees, stretching up in an image of unrelinquished infinity, it’s the elysian blue sky and the sweet smells of the honeysuckle which grew up the sides of their drop ship in the days following its landing. That’s what he hates. It made him happy, gave him a hope and belief in the potential of peace and a life free of misery.

The trees and sky and honeysuckle shouldn’t feel special though, John hates almost everything: sky people (not his people), grounders, dirt, eyes of all colors (sharp sharp blue, bitter brown, empty grey), campfires, singing, girls, boys, adults, little stupid ants. The only thing he kind of likes is food, and they don’t always get along, it’s a high maintenance friend after all.

Jaha falls into the wide swathe of things he hates, in fact he might score higher than a good many. Chancellor Thelonious Jaha, great leader, wise consultant, maker of difficult decisions, judge, executioner, murderer. It bites that they share one of those things in common. John doesn’t mind so much when he lets the sting settle, he’d always known he was destined for low things.

But Jaha is setting a hand on his shoulder, he’s turning his heavy, hopeful, kind gaze on John. He believes in something, a something which includes John, and John despite initial rejection is taken in by the utter and complete belief the man has. More so he hands him a gun, and then he hands him faith like both are completely safe in John’s hands, necessary.

It takes marching to a fucking desert and being bashed in the head by a girl he finds mildly attractive (strangely more attractive after she proves she’s as much coated in immorality as John) for John to place a tentative hand on the faith and then to look to Jaha with a shaky, capricious trust.

Jaha just smiles softly, strong and confident, biblical self-righteous assurity unwavering. It makes John sick and then it makes John feel warm, because Jaha is soft to him and believes in him and is unwavering when he looks at John and tells him that he is of infinite importance.

Half way through the desert, sitting in a storm with bits of skin and bone flecked on him as a garish make up routine, John feels his hate and anger seep up and whirl about, biting and tearing like the sand around him. He wants to scream at Jaha, tell the man that he tried to murder his son, to say that he handed the knife to a twelve year old girl and coaxed her to murder (a lie just to see the man shudder). He wants to hurt him, make Jaha feel the pain he did when his father was spaced, to know what it was like to have a mother who whipped him with words and spat venom at him for something he didn’t want to happen.

Then the sand is gone and he’s coated with it. Standing, shaking it from his limbs and hair, pulling away his mask to blink out at a new world that is the same he feels like he’s been baptized, that Jaha has summoned the storm just for this, to purify him and sand away all the things he’s been carrying. It’s a joke, it really is, because John is still angry, bitter, cynical, and most importantly faithless.

He believes in Jaha though.

It's not that John, or Murphy, only Jaha says John now, doesn't know that Jaha is crazy. He sees it, recognizes it and knows intimately' that the man is more than a few marbles short. It doesn't matter, he loves Jaha, the idea, the man, his belief, his hand upon John's shoulder looking at him tenderly and with belief.

John used to think that forgiveness wasn't something he'd ever want (deserve) but Jaha hands it to him with confidence and then says the little phrase 'second chances’. John's in love, desperately, with this image which offers him everything. Jaha wants him, Jaha believes in him, Jaha sees him as something of value, and Jaha stands by his side telling him he has purpose. So yes, John is desperately in love.

It's worse because Jaha's faith takes them from cliff edge to cliff edge, they cling on and survive. Through minefields, through a lifeless city of lights that welcomes all because there is no one to reject, and onto a boat over a lake.

It's after he's hurt and he sees Jaha roughly shove the other survivor into the water that everything flickers and wavers. He's afraid again, terrified of being an expendable tool to be discarded at a moment's notice (just like with Bellamy, with Finn, with Clarke).

Eighty six days later and Jaha is sweeping him into his arms, his voice is the same --ever comforting, ever kind-- and John allows himself to be pulled under, his faith absolute. 

He sees the light again, sees it shimmer forth from brown eyes and he falls deeper. It's luminescent, shining, bright, a clear unwavering infinity which draws him in, it's honeysuckle given immortality, it's blue sky painted into time and tied down to every moment. John believes.


End file.
